Experimental history: the appeal of postmodernism in historiography

Use, truth and time constitute the basic elements of the epistemological structure of history. That structure went through three stages: pre-modern (from ancient times to the late eighteenth century, before the professionalization of history took place), modern (the period of professional history, from the late eighteenth century to the 1970s), and post modern (post 1970s). In these three stages, use, truth, and time successively occupied the core of the epistemological structure of history. Postmodernist history, which puts time at the core of its epistemology, is an extreme form of historicism. Even more than historicism, it has emphasized the determining effect of time and change on historical truth and historical consciousness. The privatization of historical narrative and reading has prodded history to become experimental. Experimental history no longer proclaims the truth about the past. Instead, under specific historical circumstances, it strives to produce texts that will be recognized by individual historians and provides these texts to readers, who will make their own judgments. Whether these texts are true will be decided through the uses they produce. In this way, any historiographical practice will be an experiment conducted by an historian in the present and that will consist in searching for the truth about the past. The success of this experiment will depend entirely on the experimental environment, that is, on the conditions provided by the reading environment.     

文本话语与行为规范:西藏宗教人物传记的史学史意义

From the perspective of historical anthropology, this article examines a great deal of the biographies of religious figures in Tibetan history, reveals their special way of writing, classification, and circulation. In Tibetan Buddhism, biographies of religious figures are considered as a subject’s demise (lung-rgyun) and have their special meanings. They are the text of the largest quantity in the historical works of Tibet and had great influence on Tibetan historiography. A comprehensive research on their cultural characteristic, historical evolvement and historical influence will help us understand the Tibetan culture in depth. __________ Translated from Shixueshi Yanjiu 史学史研究 (Journal of Historiography), 2007, (4): 67–77     

5. TIME GARDENS: HISTORICAL CONCEPTS IN MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY

This article argues for the analysis of temporal concepts such as “age,” “century,” and “epoch,” “past,” “present,” and “future,” formed during the Enlightenment, as an approach to the study of the history of modern historiography. Starting from the basic distinction of “empty” and “embodied” time in Leibniz's and Newton's dispute of 1715 about the philosophical nature of time, it traces the episteme of the eighteenth century using the metaphor of a “time garden” for describing some basic features of enlightened historiography. Finally, the paper discusses the consequences of the increasing employment of concepts of embodied time for the future development of the historical sciences.     

严复社会史观的构建与近代史学转向

The construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history has combined the indigenization of Western historiography and the modernization of traditional Chinese historiography, which reflects the characteristic of a change towards modern historiography. The academic sources of Yan’s view on social history include some Western thoughts such as Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinist theory, Edward Jenks’ patriarchal clan system theory, John Seeley’s political historiography, etc.; and also many indigenous sources such as Yang Zhu’s self benefit, Mozi’s selfless love, Buddhist views on mood, etc. __________ Translated from Shixue Lilun Yanjiu 史学理论研究 (Historiography Quarterly), 2007, (1): 74–86     

From Barbarism to Religion: Church History and the Enlightened Narrative in Germany

The subject of this essay is the historical vision of the GermanCatholic Enlightenment as seen in the work of Michael IgnazSchmidt, a Catholic priest and author of the eleven-volume Historyof the Germans (1778–1793). A proper acknowledgement ofSchmidt's career helps us revise the standard account of Germanhistoricism and historical practice in the eighteenth century,and also sheds light on the place of religion in the GermanEnlightenment. Schmidt wrote a thoroughly modern ‘historyof manners’ that was indebted both to Voltaire and toRobertson. Yet his work passed into obscurity largely becausehe focused on the Holy Roman Empire and the Imperial Church—thetwo great casualties of the Napoleonic passage. Schmidt's viewof the Reformation, and, more importantly, of the history ofthe pre-Reformation German national Church, stands out in theprominence it assigns the Church as part of the history of thedevelopment of German manners. Schmidt's account throws intoquestion the common view in the history of the German ‘nation’that Germany could not be accorded the normal attributes ofa state and existed only as a ‘cultural nation’.The essay addresses the German problem of bi-confessionalism,and Schmidt's awareness of developments in Protestant theologyin the eighteenth century. While this paper does not try todeal comprehensively with all these issues, the essay showshow the agenda of reformist religion, national history, andthe Enlightened vision of Europe's Christian past coalescedin this unjustly forgotten work.     

20世纪中国史学界对历史规律问题的探讨

20世纪中国历史学界对历史规律性问题进行了长期反复的争论。人们对历史规律的研究主要有两种,一种是社会发展史意义的规律,一种是历史认识论意义的规律。长期以来,绝大多数人把五种生产方式的演进当作历史规律的主要形式。近年来一些学者反思过去研究中的简单化倾向．对历史规律的研究开始进入到历史认识论的层面,对规律的理解日益深入和具体。     

Rethinking the Historiographical Impulse: The History of Ancient Israel as a Problem

The first part of this paper provides some insights into the problematic nature of the genre “history of ancient Israel”, both in terms of historiography and of historical epistemology. It is argued that the concept “history of ancient Israel” is essentially valid within a particular modern theological or biblical historiographical context. As such, this history of ancient Israel may indeed progress and generate new understandings but is nonetheless seriously limited by its main concern with “biblical Israel”. It is also proposed that in order to overcome these thematic and epistemological historical limitations, a wider history of ancient Palestine or the Southern Levant should be envisioned, into which to understand the epigraphic and archaeological realia of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, together with other contemporary polities in the region, and the later development of biblical traditions and texts. The second part of the paper addresses questions of ethnogenesis, socio-political organization and identity in the light of the previous discussion, setting the stage for an alternative history of Israel and other historical realities in ancient Palestine.     

HISTORY IN THE SIKH PAST1

This article offers a reading of an early eighteenth‐century Punjabi text—Gur Sobha or “The Splendor of the Guru”—as a form of historical representation, suggesting reasons for the importance of the representation of the past as history within Sikh discursive contexts. The text in question provides an account of the life, death, and teachings of the last of the ten living Sikh Gurus or teachers, Guru Gobind Singh. The article argues that the construction of history in this text is linked to the transition of the Sikh community at the death of the last living Guru whereby authority was invested in the canonical text (granth) and community (panth). As such a particular rationale for history was produced within Sikh religious thought and intellectual production around the discursive construction of the community in relation to the past and as a continuing presence. As such, the text provides an alternative to modern European forms of historical representation, while sharing some features of the “historical” as defined in that context. The essay relates this phenomenon to a broader exploration of history in South Asian contexts, to notions of historicality that are plural, and to issues particular to the intersection of history and religion. Later texts, through the middle of the nineteenth century, are briefly considered, to provide a sense of the significance of Gur Sobha within a broader, historically and religiously constituted Sikh imagination of the past.     

影视史学的思考

影视史学在现代科技发展和历史学本身变革的交相催产下 ,它呱呱坠地 ,蹒跚走来。影视史学不仅仅是历史方法上的摸索和创新 ,还对长期以来的历史思维、历史认识等传统概念产生影响 ,许多方面牵连到了史学上许多基本的理论问题。本文试图对影视究竟能在多大程度上用来“写”历史作出初步探讨 ,并对其本身的优势和局限性作一论析。     

1. INTRODUCTION: MULTIPLE TIMES AND THE WORK OF SYNCHRONIZATION

In this essay, which introduces the History and Theory forum on Multiple Temporalities, I want to discuss how the existence of a plurality or a multiplicity of times has been conceptualized in the historiographical tradition, partly by entering into a dialogue with recent writers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars, partly by returning to the eighteenth century, to the origin of “the modern regime of historicity” (Hartog). In these theoretical and historical investigations I aim to do two things: on the one hand, to explore and discuss different ways of conceptualizing multiple times, in terms of nonsynchronicities, layers of time, or natural and historical times; on the other hand, to trace how these multiple times have been compared, unified, and adapted by means of elaborate conceptual and material practices that I here call “practices of synchronization.” From the eighteenth century onward, these synchronizing practices, inspired by, but by no means reducible to, chronology have given rise to homogeneous, linear, and teleological time, often identified as modern time per se, or simply referred to as “progress.” In focusing on the practices of synchronization, however, I want to show how this regime of temporality during its entire existence, but especially at the moment of its emergence in the eighteenth century and at the present moment of its possible collapse, has been challenged by other times, other temporalities, slower, faster, with other rhythms, other successions of events, other narratives, and so on.     

History of Science or History of Learning

This essay presents analogies between the development of historical writing and of physical science during the early modern period. Its necessarily spotty coverage runs from the mid sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth. The analogies include arising from practical concerns; preferring material documents and experimental inquiries over texts; making use of mathematical auxiliary sciences; distinguishing between primary and secondary elements; establishing new fundamental principles; undermining the traditional world system; and devising methods to control rapidly multiplying knowledge. A history of learning that meets today's standards of historical scholarship should identify and exploit such parallels, not only because of scholarly interest and responsibility, but also because an understanding of the historical importance of linkages between distant branches of learning may help redress the increasing imbalance in resources among the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities in our higher schools and universities.     

近代天津城市边缘区的形成及其结构特征

During the first half of the 20^th century, when China experienced a new tide of urbanization, a tendency appeared, in which the upper strata moved to the urban center and the lower strata distributed over the marginal area, where poor people formed a new community. This marginal community bore distinctive characteristics no matter in spatial structure or in residents’ life style in the development of modern Tianjin. The lower culture from the marginal areas and the upper culture from the foreign concessions constituted an interaction urban cultural structure in modern China. Translated by Lü Chunjun from Tianjin Shifan Daxue Xuebao 天津师范大学学报 (Journal of Tianjin Normal University), 2007, (4): 37–41     

Was William Shakespeare an Eighteenth-Century Geographer? Constructing Histories of Geographical Knowledge

A Wittgensteinian view of language and meaning is employed in a modified approach to the historiography of geography which steers between socio-economic approaches and the scepticism engendered by post-structuralist theories of language, so enabling connections between geography and humanism to be explored. The contextual history which flows from this method is exemplified by an analysis of eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare and the approaches they adopted to discussing Shakespeare's knowledge of geography and the natural world. The early eighteenth century edited Shakespeare in the light of subsequent knowledge of nature, thus removing him from historical context and rendering him as an eighteenth century geographer. By contrast, later editions, starting with Samuel Johnson's (1765), attempted to recover the geographical knowledge Shakespeare could have possessed in the Tudor period. The two editorial projects are related back to the religious, natural philosophical and historical beliefs of the editors. Individual intellects, the history of textuality and the shifting affiliations of geography in the division of knowledge need to be addressed more closely in future work on the history of geography.     

Early modern or late imperial philology? The crisis of classical learning in eighteenth century China

The discourses of classical scholars during the eighteenth century reinforced a shift from Song-Ming rationalism to a more skeptical and secular classical empiricism. By making precise scholarship the source of acceptable knowledge, Qing classicists contended that the legitimate reach of ancient ideals should be reevaluated through comparative delineation of the textual sources from which all such knowledge derived. This turn to empirically based classical inquiry meant that abstract ideas and rational argumentation gave way as the primary objects of elite discussion to concrete facts, verifiable institutions, ancient natural studies, and historical events. In general, Qing classicists regarded Song and Ming “Learning of the Way” as an obstacle to verifiable truth because it discouraged further inquiry along empirical lines. The empirical approach to knowledge they advocated placed proof and verification at the heart of analysis of the classical tradition. During this time, scholars and critics also applied historical analysis to the official Classics. Classical commentary yielded to textual criticism and a “search for evidence” to refortify the ancient canon. Representing a late imperial movement in Confucian letters, Qing classicists still sought to restore the classical vision. The early modern power of their philology, however, yielded the forces of decanonization and delegitimation as modernist trends, which went beyond the intellectual limits they had imposed on their own writings.     

从环境的历史到环境史——关于环境史研究的一种认识

By and large, there are three kinds of research on environment: the history of environment as a field of natural history studies, the history of environment as within the scope of history of society studies, and environmental history as the study of the relationship between human and nature. The methodological perspective of the relationship between humanity and environmental distinguishes the third from the previous two. From this perspective, when we probe the mutual effects between human and nature, we will stress on their interactions. The new era and the realities of contemporary society foster the rise of environmental history, which has not only theoretical values but also practical significance. Translated from Xueshu Yanjiu 学术研究 (Academic Research), 2006, (9):12–22     

少数民族史学的发展与多民族统一国家观念的形成

Chinese culture is established by bringing together many nationalities. Chinese historiography has recorded the development of this great culture. Among these records, ethnic minority historiography reflects one important aspect for identifying the historic trend of the formation of a united multiethnic nation. A comprehensive study on the development of Chinese ethnic minority historiography shows that it can be divided into six phases: the Pre-Qin period to the Qin and Han dynasties; the Wei, Jin, Southern-Northern and Sui-Tang dynasties; the Liao, Song, Xia, Jin and Yuan dynasties; the Ming and Qing dynasties (before 1840); the modern times (1840–1949); and the contemporary times. Deep analysis of these phases would inevitably improve the study of the history of Chinese historiography. Translated by Ding Haiyan from Hebei Xuekan 河北学刊 (Hebei Academic Journal), 2007, (6): 91–94     

中国史学对近代报刊的影响

中国史学与近代报刊在学术史上有着很深的渊源。19世纪初报刊传入中国,无论是学还是术都未臻成熟,必然要向中国传统学术吸取养分,且近代报人多有史学学术背景,由此形成近代报刊史家办报的特点。本文拟从史学的经世致用思想、史论及良史等三个方面探讨中国史学对近代报刊的影响。     

Several issues influencing the course of German history

The course of German history is very sinuous. German nationalism, the imbalance of the political and economic development generated by the influence of the historical and cultural traditions, the might of the Junker feudal aristocracy, the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the postwar reeducation of democratization imposed by the western allied powers on Germany, the developed education and technology, etc. are all important factors that influenced Germany’s history. __________ Translated from: Wuhan Daxue Xuebao, Renwen Kexue Ban 武汉大学学报: 人文科学版 (Wuhan University Journal, Humanity Science), No. 3, 2004     

昭君想象与时代变迁

Wang Zhaojun was a romanticized historical figure. The visualization of her was characterized by specific historical and social backgrounds. While her image was shaped with the thousands of years’ expansion of northern interethnic relations in ancient China, the united modern multi-ethnic state created her glorious image as “an angel bringing about national harmony, peace, and unity.” __________ Translated by Feng Mei from Zhongyang Minzu Daxue Xuebao 中央民族大学学报 (Journal of the Central University for Nationalities), 2008, (1): 55–58     

20世纪中国的史学方法论研究

20世纪中国史学方法论研究,是一笔丰厚的史学遗产。从梁启超的《新史学》,到三四十年代一系列史学理论方法论读本的出版,再到当代台湾的史学方法论研究,是新史学派史学方法发展的大体脉络。从李大钊对马克思主义历史观的介绍和宣传,到郭沫若所代表的开始用马克思主义研究中国历史的尝试和实践,再到翦伯赞的《历史哲学教程》的出版,标志着中国马克思主义史学发展的第一阶段;从50到70年代是马克思主义史学方法广泛普及和曲折发展的时期;改革开放以后的20年,是中国马克思主义史学史上方法论研究空前繁荣和活跃的时期。总结百年来的史学方法论研究,给新世纪史学发展留下了诸多启示。